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Early in one’s career in psychology, certainly starting in graduate school, if not sooner as a psych major in college, a choice point gradually emerges between seeking a career as a scholar, a scientist, and perhaps as an academic versus pursuing the life of a practitioner, one who applies the work of the former, the scholar. We faculty will often cast this choice in the form of a “tension” between science and practice. Ironically, I have never felt such tension. The purpose of this chapter is to explore choices we make in life and career, the consequences of these choices, and what we can learn in the process, that is, along the way and the implications for organization change and development.

Advocates of market-based reforms in the public sector argue that competition between providers drives up performance. But in the context of schooling, the concern is that any improvements in efficiency may come at the cost of increased stratification of schools along lines of pupil ability and attainments. In this chapter, we discuss our empirical work on competition and parental choice in English primary schools and present a methodology for identifying competition effects that exploits discontinuities in market access close to education district boundaries.

There exist a number of approaches that attempt to explain the occupational choices of youth from different perspectives. The social cognitive theory and the self-efficacy approach, to name the most influential, emphasize the centrality of cognitive abilities of individuals in making a career choice, and look at professional orientation primarily through the lenses of micro factors. This chapter extends existing approaches by accentuating the importance of cultural traditions and stereotypes for occupational choices.

This chapter uses official statistical data ranging from the rise of the USSR to the present day. These have been collected by the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) and were partly retrieved from archives.

After a review of extant theoretical frames pertinent to career choices, this chapter suggests a theory of occupational choices through the lenses of gender, thus deploying Sandra L. Bem’s (1973, 1981) framework on gender schema. Proposing a theoretical model that links micro and macro factors, the chapter then demonstrates how the approach functions in the Russian post-socialist context.

The novelty consists of incorporation of sociocultural aspects of occupational choices, thus allowing a scope for comparative research. Additionally, the proposed model of gendered career choices can be employed for explaining differences within sexes. Besides, the model argues that not primarily intelligence but often external factors shape career choices.

Leaders need diverse talent to leverage organizational success; however, leaders must also develop inclusive working environments that meet the diverse needs of their employees. This chapter seeks to support organizational leaders in using storytelling to foster a culture of inclusivity and drive inclusive leadership practices throughout their organizations. Dimensions of the inclusive leadership compass (ILC) model (embrace, empower, enable, and embed) are used to highlight organizational areas that are rich with opportunities to facilitate mindset shifts at the individual, team, and system levels. This chapter explores strategies and highlights methods leaders can use to effectively implement the powerful learning and communication technique of storytelling in each of the critical areas of the inclusive leadership model. Starting with self-knowledge, leaders can devise ways to embrace difference and expand their understanding of inclusivity to inspire others to do the same. The authors propose a phenomenological approach to advancing efforts toward an inclusive organization in a way that honors the lived experience of others. This chapter includes methods for developing psychologically safe environments and other storytelling criteria that amplify the power of storytelling in a healthy approach that will be received and reverberate throughout the organization and enhance the benefits of inclusive leadership practices.

Independent travelers are those vacationers who have booked only a minimum of their transportation and accommodation arrangements prior to departure on the vacation. Independent travel is an important and growing sector of worldwide tourism. Choice of vacation itinerary for the independent vacation represents a complex series of decisions regarding purchase of multiple leisure and tourism services. This chapter builds and tests a model of independent traveler decision-making for choice of vacation itinerary. The research undertaken employs a two-phase, inductive–deductive case study design. In the deductive phase, the researcher interviewed 20 travel parties vacationing in New Zealand for the first time. The researcher interviewed respondents at both the beginning and the end of their New Zealand vacations. The study compares pre-vacation research and plans, and actual vacation behaviors, on a case-by-case basis. The study examines case study narratives and quantitative measures of crucial variables. The study tests two competing models of independent traveler decision-making, using a pattern-matching procedure. This embedded research design results in high multi-source, multi-method validity for the supported model. The model of the Independent Vacation as Evolving Itinerary suggests that much of the vacation itinerary experienced in independent travel is indeed unplanned, and that a desire to experience the unplanned is a key hedonic motive for independent travel. Rather than following a fixed itinerary, the itinerary of an independent vacation evolves as the vacation proceeds. The independent traveler takes advantage of serendipitous opportunities to experience a number of locations, attractions and activities that they had neither actively researched nor planned.

In his soliloquy, Hamlet reasons about the choice of whether to end his life or not. Our own experience of choice contains many such instances of choice as the outcome of a reasoning process. This aspect of choice is not discussed in this book although I would look to Chapter 3 on mathematics, logic, artificial intelligence and ordinary language to provide a route into investigating this aspect.